Is anything ever truly “deleted” or just presented to users as such? I imagine once an image has been synced to the cloud, it’s stored somewhere forever, for reasons you hinted at.
I work for a large internet/tech company, and all images uploaded by users must be permanently retained somewhere per our legal policies, even if that means sending it to long-term storage after it’s been “deleted”. And if law enforcement submits a request asking for your files, we can pull it back up.
They said it’s caused by database corruption. Easy enough to imagine that the thing tasked with doing actual deletion just couldn’t traverse to all of its targets.
I like this theory. I wonder the "Delete after 30 days" part used to work and then they added some more security features which made it not work unless the phone was unlocked. i.e. it could delete out of the DB but failed to delete the file if the phone was locked when the job ran.
